Never been one to let the carrier drop

So, as one would expect, the right is busy lying about how it wasn’t them who smashed the capital, it was antifa, or a left false flag operation. Never mind the fact that *everyone* arrested thus far has been a genuine Trump supporter – never mind all the video of the event posted to right-wingers-only-allowed, free-speech-only-if-you-are-Conservative parler.

I suppose it fits in perfectly with the tendency of the right to lie. What’s interesting is increasingly, you can pretty much safely bet that anything the right accuses the left of doing, they themselves have done or are doing. You can almost start to build a play by play of their actions just by looking at their accusations. Which, of course, makes me assume that if there’s *any* truth to Q’s accusations at all – something I highly doubt – the people running the pedo ring are them on the right. Which is kind of what you’d expect – repress natural aspects of yourself (like sexuality) and they’re going to come out in other ways.

I do wonder if I should offer a URL that shows my journal without my political ranting.. I think that it does help me get out some of my anger at the awfulness and egregiousness of the right without (generally) actively getting into fights with anyone, but I also have to imagine anyone who’s interested in the majority of my life has got to be getting sick of the ‘repeatedly beating dead horse’ section.

Then again, I probably only have about 5 readers and 4 of them agree with me, so maybe it doesn’t really matter. I do sometimes wonder if I am able to build up my musical skills to where I gather some more attention what my fans will make of my blog.

So, I’ve been spending a bit of time reviewing the echo chamber that is parler.com – partially because I will take no small amount of delight in watching it go dark in a hour and fifteen minutes – but part of what it really underlines for me is how deeply delusional the True Believers of Trump are, and how much damage he’s likely done to us all with his continuous stream of lies about having won the election.

I honestly hope that Jan 21, there’s still food, shelter, and water for everyone. Believe me, the Trumpanzees are deeply deluded. They can’t fathom why anyone would dislike Dear Leader – they conveniently have forgotten all the hundreds of thousands he got killed, his tax gifts to the rich, his attempts to destroy Obamacare, the nonexistent Trumpcare, his refusal to embrace science, his evident and never ending racism (“the china virus”), his willingness to walk away from treaties we negotiated in good faith, the trade war he started and lost, etc etc – as a friend of mine says “Orange Man Bad”.

Yes. Orange man *very*, *very* bad. Orange man’s lies and/or delusions possibly about to lead to a civil war, which *no one wins*. Orange man’s encouragements have revved echo chambers in Orange Man Delusional Land (mostly from the same people hwo believe in God the Sky Fairy Who Will Torture You For All Eternity If You Don’t Believe Jesus Is Lord because he loves you so much) into levels of energy that, when you combine them with the fact that America is the most armed nation in the world, could end in major carnage.

Trump has deliberately done the opposite of unifying whenever he could. He’s repeatedly sent out emails to the Party Faithful talking about how democrats and socialists are subhuman. He’s also pumped xenophobia to the limits. I just hope that A: we make it through this in one piece and B:*maybe* people will think a little more before voting for pure evil because the alternative was sharing, and sharing is horrible!

… unless you happen to be white republicans. In which case, by all means, start a riot.

I can’t say I’m really surprised.. I’ve long known Republicans were the party of violence, because they’re the ones always starting wars to rob nations of their oil. And Trump of course has always turned this up to 11, with having web pages talking about “joining Trump’s army”, repeated lies to his followers, extreme rhetoric that makes it clear that he’s only president of Republicans and he thinks Democrats should die at the first opportunity – even *retweeting a video that says the only good democrat is a dead democrat*.

They like to think they’re the party of law and order, but they’re not. They’re the party of “the police are above the law and should murder anyone they want” – which is *not* law and order. They’re the party one thinks of when hearing of whackos taking over a federal property and not getting charged with any crimes. Yes, the police let the right get away with a lot more than the left, but that doesn’t mean the right are more law abiding. I could gesture to the list of Trump-circle folk now with felony records – or I could of course gesture to things like the Klan and the Proud Boys. (They are also the party of “Corporations are above the law”, “The rich are above the law”, and “The president is above the law”. And of course, the party of electoral disenfranchisement.)

Unfortunately one thing conservatives are not good at is skeptical thinking. Over and over they’ve been fed obvious falsehoods and yet they still keep repeating the lines that were programmed into them by the talking heads on the TV even as it becomes more and more obvious those lines were lies. And they’re never going to figure it out, apparently – if they can’t realize by now that Trump clearly lost this election, and clearly tried to cheat his way to victory, then they’re probably not going to figure that out later. If things like Trump claiming COVID would go away doesn’t convince them their leader was a moron – not to mention, I remind you, we are talking about the person who went bankrupt *running a casino* – then I don’t know what will.

I have this theory that the bizarre facial expressions Trump makes while he talks short-circuits the brains of some of the people watching. Although, I also think in general we’re not that great at being skeptical when exposed to talking heads, and we’ve seen over and over that while liberal news is willing to use quite a lot of zeal in putting spin on things, conservative news is willing to flat-out lie, over and over.

I am hoping that seeing a attempted armed coup will cause some of the right to start to realize with great shame that yes, they were aiding a wannabe-Hitler. Not that Trump was ever anywhere near as smart or capable as Hitler, but he did want to be king for life and if he could have gotten away with genocidal acts he would have. Actually, in some ways Trump was worse than Hitler. Hitler at least wanted what was best for Germany, before he became a drug addict. Trump only wanted what was best for Trump, ever.

And while we’re talking – conservative morons, the immigrants were never a problem. You have been lied to, over and over. They were a convenient group to demonize.

One silver lining about yesterday’s riots – unless we are total hypocrites (and make no mistake, we are total hypocrites and what I am about to write will not come to pass), we can never again start or feed (by sending guns or troops) a war to “make the world safe for democracy”. We have demonstrated that we have no moral superiority, that we are not and never were the side of the angels, and that in fact our system of government will eventually hand nuclear codes to a toddler.

https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/533172-zimbabwean-president-capitol-riots-show-us-has-no-right-punish shows that I am not alone in thinking this. (Of course, I’ve been sharply critical of the USA’s tendency to be murderous thugs, a oil company with a army, for quite some time now – and we also have a recorded history of overthrowing democracy in order to install totalitarian regimes, so “Making the world safe for democracy” was never really anything but a convenient excuse for being abusive in the ways we wanted to be.)

Another article that says things better than I could: https://eand.co/this-is-why-america-is-becoming-a-poor-country-41a8d6003e90.

I know that lately it’s been hip and happening if you’re on the right to ignore reality. After all, we’ve seen the Laffer curve not work out time and time again, and yet you all keep voting like you’re Charlie Brown running to kick a football that by now you should be able to figure out that Lucy is going to yank away from you. You all remain deeply committed to the idea that the invisible hand of the market will fix everything – and let’s not even talk about the obvious economic sense of solar and wind, and your attempts to lie to the american people – some of which are apparently dumb enough to not understand that the grid has required some energy storage in order to remain stable for the last 50+ years.

But let’s talk about what voting for the right in a modern context means.

It means “People who have bad luck should starve and die.”

It means “If you happen to live in a watershed where fracking is occuring, you deserve the cancer that’s going to kill you. You also deserve the bankruptcy that our horrible, corrupt, broken healthcare system will push you into for treatments before you die.”

It means “I believe in freedom only when it’s a freedom I want to have”. In particular, you shouldn’t have the freedom to mess with your blood chemistry – unless it’s with alcohol – but you should have the freedom to carry a tool for killing other people. You shouldn’t have the freedom to do *anything* if you’re black.

It means “The police should kill any non-white people they want to, for any reason, and I will cheer them on. Murder of innocents by police and by our army is perfectly acceptable.”

It means “The rich deserve to be able to enslave the rest of us.”

It means “We should choose the dumbest possible way to generate and use energy if it makes the people who are currently rich richer.”

It means “Corporations should be more important than people.”

It means “You should be educated with a series of lies that matches how we’d like you to see the world so we can go on raping, murdering, and looting”

It means “If you are not a white male, you deserve to be a third-class citizen”

It means “Capitalism is more important than people. If capitalism isn’t compatible with mass automation, continue with mass automation and just let the excess workers starve to death. They are worth nothing anyway.”

It means “Life is cheap.”. In fact, we underline that fact with the USA’s COVID death record.

It means “Justice is for sale to the highest bidder.”

And, lately, it means “The majority’s votes only count if the majority voted Republican.”, along with the corollaries of “If you can’t win, cheat” and “lying about voter fraud in order to cheat your way to a victory is totally valid.. if you’re a republican.”

It means “Every child left behind”. It means standardized tests and money/funding are more important than teaching. After all, gotta make those profits at the standardized testing companies. It also means the rich should have a good education and the poor should have a bad one so we can make sure they remain poor. And of course, it means we should lie to our children – we should pretend there is any reason at all to think the Bible is anything other than a bunch of stories written by a bunch of people 2000 years ago, for example.

I’m not even going to touch the subject of religion, since there’s a whole category on this blog specifically for that.

I could go on for a while..

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/01/what-republicans-are-doing-worse-treason/617538/

– I think this article does a good job of pointing out the obvious.  Republicans, in their quest to be as awful as possible and hurt humanity as much as possible so a few individuals can get further ahead, have finally gone over the watershed line and are now advocating to throw out the result of a free and fair election. They are living in a interesting cloudcuckooland where if someone didn’t vote for their Dear Leader, their vote must be wrong – they are now screaming “Count all the republican votes. Throw all the democratic votes out.”

I’m impressed, yet again, by their awfulness, greed, and stupidity.

So, one of the challenges that I’ve talked about repeatedly is how money isn’t value, it is a pointer to it. And I think this is a important thing to remember, just in general. However, someone who will remain nameless talked about how Biden “was going to stop all fracking and it was going to make things more expensive for me”.

Well, first of all, Biden’s not going to stop all fracking. He’s just going to keep us from expanding fracking. But second of all, fracking is something we do that increases costs to all of us enormously. It’s a monumentally dumb thing to do because we’re damaging the most valuable resource on the planet, water, something we all need, in order to get something that’s readily available, energy. (The sky is literally raining soup here.)

The thing that you have to remember, when thinking about this, is fracking’s cost is hidden in the future. It’s huge – probably trillions of dollars – but you don’t pay it now, you pay it 20 or 50 or 100 years from now.

If you don’t frack, we have less natural gas and we have to depend on other sources of power. (The same friend pointed out that there are clouds and days with no wind – I didn’t point out about hydro and pumped storage, or flow batteries, or electrolysis and hydrogen.)

Now, if we do the sensible thing (solar, hydro, wind, next-gen nuclear) all of the sources of power will be considerably cheaper in measured cost to get them than fracking. The cost of energy *in real resources and human lives* will go *down*.

If we do frack, we destroy the groundwater, we lose millions of gallons of water to the process, and we condemn our children to have to spend trillions of dollars cleaning up our mess. Naturally republicans are in favor, because to them, the money *is* the value. They see it making greenbacks now, and the idea of tracing value flows instead of tracing money is beyond them.

It opens a interesting side idea. What about a government where in order to serve as a congresscritter, you have to show certain abilities? A meritocracy, in other words. I would *love* to see a sport pilot license as a minimum requirement to be a congresscritter. (Learning to fly a airplane teaches you a lot of important life lessons). Even more interesting would be one in which you had to show significant proficiency in C. (Hey, at least that way I’d know they knew what pointers *were*)

So, over in Trump-land, despite having lost by 7+ million votes in the popular election, and many states in the electoral collage, Trump is trying to overturn those results so he can continue being dictator.

I guess first I’m curious about who the deplorables.. and I think that word really does fit .. who are okay with the fact that Fearless Leader clearly lost but is trying to cheat his way to a victory are. I know part of what’s going on there is that their news sources are lying to them – as they have been this entire time – and they still keep patting themselves on the back about how the ‘lamestream media’ is lying and Fearless Leader is telling the truth, despite all kinds of data to the contrary.

Beyond that, I’m curious what Trump thinks will happen if he does cheat himself to victory? Does he think the American people, who just voted him out rather decisively, will not use stronger means of persuasion if he decides to refuse to leave and order us all to yell “Heil Trump!”. I mean, we’ve seen recently – as Trump lied about Antifa – that many, many Americans are not okay with cops murdering citizens. I think Trump would discover that even more Americans are not okay with being led by a fascist dictator.

I also still have hope that at some point those who enabled this catastrophe will feel shame – and I would *like* to think that them as voted in the people who are currently supporting Trump in his attempt to subvert fair and free elections will be voted out, but I’ve come to accept that people on the right are about as smart as Charlie Brown expecting Lucy not to pull the football away. After all, they fell for the Laffer curve again. And they fell for WMDs. And they’ve fallen for many, many things. They still think money is the value, rather than a pointer to it, and they can’t understand why them Democrats “Stealing money from my wallet!” actually makes everyone including them richer because they can’t understand that wealth is about resource flows, not about money. So they probably won’t realize they elected someone with the morals of hitler combined with the IQ of Amazon Alexa. But maybe their children will.

Anyway, as I said, even if Trump manages to cheat his way past this defeat by invalidating the votes of hundreds of thousands of people, I don’t see the endgame working out well for him.

So, for about a year, I was paid by a organization I am not going to name, at least yet, to examine California’s rolls for signs of voter fraud. What I found was a little bit of ‘noise’ – a few hundred cases.. a few thousand if you take the view of the Republicans that homeless and drug addicts should not be permitted to vote. I did not find any signs of massive voter fraud, nor did I really expect to. Nothing I saw came anywhere near possibly changing a election – but the voter fraud that the republicans are perpetrating right now in restricting access to mail in and drop off voting during election very well might enable their destructive and, frankly, evil brand to continue to hold onto power and use it to destroy our way of life in favor of more yachts for Betsy Devos and more power for the toddler Trump.

What this mostly tells me is that right now, we are seeing voter fraud. The republicans are committing it. By claiming (even though we all know it isn’t true) that there’s massive voter fraud in mail in voting, they are lying in order to suppress part of the vote and cheat on the upcoming election. This isn’t surprising – Republicans are the party of cheating, after all – but it is saddening. It says truly bad things about the state of our democratic republic that federal judges are encouraging voter suppression. It isn’t that shocking – I am sure they are enmeshed in the false reality pushed by the republican-held and controlled media (the true purveyors of fake news, as anyone who actually tries comparing reality with the statements of the media can fairly quickly figure out)

It is sad that the republican-affiliated citizenry, rather than trying to stop their runaway representatives that are willing to cheat to win, is cheering on the cheating. They know, for example, that Mitch did not permit a supreme court justice pick by Obama to go through because it was too close to a election, and yet they are cheering on the frantic (and COVID-spreading) attempts to wedge the current justice pick just *days* before the election.

This is not a matter of preference in the same way windows vs unix or Yankees vs Red Sox is – this is actively a case of the people in power are doing massively destructive things and people are defending it. It’s not clear whether tehy’re defending it because they’re brainwashed by the lies being sent out, or they’re defending it because they don’t know how to *not* defend the people who are affiliated with their brand, or they’re defending it because they embrace evil and find it beautiful, or because they think that the 1% should be richer than they are and the rest of us poorer – but defend it they do.

So, it has occured to me that the decision to politicize wearing PPE during a pandemic is impressively moronic. It also has occured to me that given that Trump is very likely a russian asset, it’s possible that Russia has been pushing the message of not masking to the US as a way to hurt the US.

On the other paw, long term, it might actually kind of help the US. I know plenty of conservatives who are smart enough to still wear PPE, so what it might be doing is weeding out the dumbest – one unfortunate thing about birth control is that it *encourages* the dumbest among us to be the most prevalent in the next generation – it’s kind of the opposite of evolution. Things like seeing who is dumb enough to buy the message that the media is lying to you and you should not wear a mask during a pandemic might actually act in a pro-evolutionary manner.

Anyway, this does kind of illustrate the problem with a two party system. People start building polarizing decisions around really stupid things. I realize this is very convenient in the case of the global warming debate – a few old guys get to get richer, then die before the rest of us have to face the consequences for their awful decision-making. Of course, in general that’s a problem that we have with the command and control axis on earth – the old folks who don’t have to suffer the consequences end up with the most power and making the most decisions. Then you add in a religion that teaches that as long as you have this one wacky belief it doesn’t matter what you do and you have a pretty good recipe for some pretty dystopian moments.